Tag: film-history-tag/features

Derek’s crime was an act of intense brutality, portrayed in gut-wrenching detail. In a monochrome flashback, Derek, clad only in white boxers and black military-style boots, his chest emblazoned with a swastika tattoo, shoots two black men in his front garden who’d been trying to steal his car in a turf-war retaliation, killing one instantly. The other, wounded but still conscious, lies sprawled in the grass and Derek proceeds to kill him by stomping his head on the kerb. Soon after, police sirens arrive to bathe Derek in shimmering light, and he raises his hands behind his head in an almost messianic pose of martyrdom. From this pivotal moment, the film traces the circumstances that kindled Derek’s rage and shaped it into racialised grievances, the hollow disillusionment that follows, and his uncertain quest for redemption.

Writer David McKenna drafted the script in six weeks as the 1992 LA Riots, set off by the Rodney King beating, raged outside his apartment. After finishing a second draft, he consulted with Tony Kaye, a British ad director who had been tapped to direct his first feature film. Kaye led McKenna to a skinhead party where the screenwriter took down information from a white nationalist. “For a half hour I talked to a guy with an M-16 tattooed to the side of his head. It was pretty intimidating, if not terrifying,” recalled McKenna. After shooting on the film wrapped, Tony Kaye’s behaviour went from mercurial to outright bizarre. At meetings with New Line Cinema representatives, he brought along a religious retinue of a rabbi, a priest, and a monk in a strange bid to convince executives that his film was not a commercial product but a prophecy.

But a real fight began when Norton inserted himself into the stalled editing process to cut a version of the film that added 18 minutes to its runtime – and played to rave responses from test audiences. In a jealous fury, Kaye dumped $100,000 into paid advertisements in the Hollywood press savaging what he saw as duplicitous meddling by his lead actor. When the studio moved forward with Norton’s cut, Kaye fought to strip his name from the credits, and finally filed a $200m lawsuit against New Line, which was ultimately dismissed. A decade on, Kaye admitted his ego got the best of him: “Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to apologise to all the people that I aggravated. I was doing my best, it was my passion, but I was still completely in the wrong.”

Challenging a persistent myth

A brilliant film emerged from these skirmishes – but its core insight still takes work to unpack. For generations, a persistent myth that black families were irreparably broken by sloth and hedonism had been perpetuated by US culture. Congress’s landmark 1965 Moynihan Report, for example, blamed persistent racial inequality not on stymied economic opportunity but on the “tangle of pathologies” within the black family. Later, politicians circulated stereotypes of checked-out “crackheads” and lazy “welfare queens” to tar black women as incubators of thugs, delinquents, and “superpredators“. American History X made the bold move of shifting the spotlight away from the maligned black family and on to the sphere of the white family, where it illuminated a domestic scene that was a fertile ground for incubating racist ideas.

To achieve such a humane approach, Meadows filmed chronologically, encouraging improvisation in rehearsals to fully flesh out even the most diabolical of his characters. It’s how Paddy Considine ended up with a green army jacket – he wanted to pay homage to Sylvester Stallone in First Blood – and a random gas mask which helped him get into character. The results are effective. “When [one of the thugs] Herbie thinks he’s striking a deal for his life, and then he gets that awful [knifing], and you can hear the fluid dripping out from the knife wound. I was watching that live, and we weren’t quite sure how Paddy was going to play it. It was frightening. That’s almost where he’s becoming a monster himself, playing psychological games to wreak that revenge. He’s becoming like the people who did what they did to his brother.”

Reckoning with revenge

In retrospect, the film’s interest in the complexity and futility of violent revenge does feel part of a running thread in Meadows’ work. In 2019, in an interview with The Guardian before his TV series The Virtues aired, Meadows spoke for the first time about a long-repressed childhood sexual assault he experienced, an incident that haunted him, and has perhaps informed his work. The Virtues is arguably Meadows’ most mature and haunting output, and features a masterclass in performance from Stephen Graham as a man searching through the pieces of a similarly traumatic past.

When I say that rewatching Dead Man’s Shoes tale of reckoning between closure and payback drew some parallels with The Virtues, Meadows says: “I won’t go into The Virtues on a personal level too much, but, over the course of [reckoning with the assault], I had a decision to make for myself. I’m not saying it was on the scale of Dead Man’s Shoes. But there was a part of me that wanted to give someone a right good hiding. But I thought, I’ve got two choices here. And maybe the best thing I can do is use the tools that I’ve learned to use best, which is actually to make something about it, rather than try and go back to my life 20 years ago and get into an excessive sort of street fight scenario. So I’ve not got to the roots of some of those things in myself, but [with Dead Man’s Shoes] I was already kind of starting to think, well: forgiveness is the answer.”

That the men of Dead Man’s Shoes are too poisonous or blind to see that until it’s too late is undoubtedly part of the point, but there’s no judgement here. “Sometimes it wasn’t the case of wanting to be this cockfighting uber-man kind of character,” Meadows says of his rough-and-tumble past. “You were almost protecting yourself like a shield. So my interest in masculinity has always been about that complexity, and I’ve been drawn to that my whole life. There’s a grey area to it that’s about more than people just being thugs.”    

Given the cultural specificity of Dead Man’s Shoes, it’s a perfect crown jewel for a film season like Acting Hard. It is not only about violence, masculinity, or revenge as free-floating academic ideas: it’s about a scenario where all of these things are inextricable from the world they emerge from, and the very act of examining them at all is a step in the right direction. 

Dead Man’s Shoes is re-released on 15 September. Acting Hard, a season of films exploring working class masculinity, is on now at BFI Southbank until 2 October.

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The film has more than stood the test of time, and in 2004 was inducted into the US Library of Congress’s National Film Library of “culturally significant” films. But during production, Enter the Dragon appeared snake bitten. The first-ever co-production between a Chinese film company (Golden Harvest/Concord) and a Hollywood studio (Warner Brothers), it was plagued by language barriers, script issues, and at least one physical confrontation involving its star. And the budget was significantly less than the commonly reported $850,000, claims associate producer Andre Morgan. “The whole budget was $450,000,” he tells BBC Culture. “Remember, you heard it from somebody that was there. I prepared the budget; I signed the budget.” Regardless, the profits were astronomical, with Enter the Dragon reportedly grossing $100,000,0000 worldwide upon its initial release.

A star like few others

Morgan worked on the Chinese side. He was just 20 years old when principal photography commenced and celebrated his 21st birthday on the iconic hall of mirrors set that was built specifically for the climactic duel between Lee’s character and the villainous Han. He tells BBC Culture that in person Lee had a star presence unlike almost anyone else. “Bruce Lee never walked into a room in his life; he entered a room. When Bruce was in a room, nobody else mattered. Steve McQueen was the same,” he says. Indeed, McQueen was a close friend and student of Lee, who before hitting the big time himself, taught martial arts to a host of celebrities.

By the early 70s, McQueen, aka “The King of Cool”, had conquered Hollywood with iconic appearances in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair. Lee, who was born in San Francisco in 1940 but spent his formative years in Hong Kong, would also conquer Hollywood. After returning to the US in 1959, he made Seattle home, and attended the University of Washington to study philosophy. Soon thereafter, Lee started a family, and eventually decamped to California to pursue his film career in earnest.

But he had one major strike against him: he was Chinese. Regardless of his eye-popping martial arts skills and background as a child actor in the Hong Kong film industry, Hollywood’s biggest powerbrokers were unwilling to risk a significant investment on a 5ft-7in, 135lb Chinese leading man with a thick Cantonese accent. They were making a big mistake.

The Archers’ script recasts Colonel Blimp as Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy, introducing him in then-present-day 1943 as the familiarly rotund and moustachioed caricature from Low’s drawings. An extended flashback then moves 40 years into the past, finding Candy as a youthful subaltern on leave from the Boer War, Victoria Cross gleaming on his chest. Tracing this soldier’s life over the subsequent four decades, three wars, and two doomed romances, Powell and Pressburger explore how Candy’s reactionary worldview is shaped and calcified by his experiences as an unquestioning servant of the British military. As Powell wrote in a letter to the actor Wendy Hiller, reproduced in Ian Christie’s edited edition of the film’s screenplay, “Blimps are made, not born. Let us show that their aversion to any form of change springs from the very qualities that made them invaluable in action; that their lives, so full of activity, are equally full of frustration…”

The establishment upset

Authorities at the Ministry of Information and the War Office were dismayed by the project and refused any official support. According to SP Mackenzie’s book British War Films 1939-45, Secretary of State for War PJ Grigg wrote to Powell in June 1934, “I am getting rather tired of the theory that we can best enhance our reputation in the eyes of our own people or the rest of the world by drawing attention to the faults which the critics attribute to us, especially when, as in the present case, the criticism no longer has any substance.” A summary of the script found its way to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who wrote to Minister of Information Brenden Bracken, “Pray propose to me the measures necessary to stop this foolish production before it gets any further.”

“Churchill sometimes got a bee in his bonnet about things he didn’t fully understand,” Richard Toye, Professor of History at the University of Exeter and author of Winston Churchill: A Life in the News, tells BBC Culture. “He quite often had harsh, repressive instincts when it came to the media, but he didn’t always follow them through, and other people stood in his way to try to make him see sense.”

Indeed, Bracken was uncomfortable with Churchill’s request, and responded that he had “no power to supress the film”, warning that “in order to stop it the government would need to assume powers of a very far-reaching kind”.

“Bracken’s line was that British propaganda was geared towards the differences between democracy and dictatorship, and that to suppress the film would have been the sort of thing the Nazis did,” James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, tells BBC Culture. “A democracy, even in wartime, has to be strong enough to allow the expression of dissenting voices.”